To be fair, I don't know anything at all about how their (1) their features, or (2) their support are since I fired Grade.us and switched to GatherUp in May 2018.

What I can say is that at that time, a year ago, support at Grade.us was bad (as mentioned above) and the features were, well, not very easy to use, for the most part. Composing the review request emails was very difficult, with a quirky UI that often lost all the work I had done and also arbitrarily removed things that I wanted left in, but I cannot remember now what those were. One thing that I DID like about Grade.us, that GatherUp does not yet have, is automatic sharing of favorable google reviews out to Facebook, but in the overall big picture that's a relatively minor thing.

I also really respect Mike Blumenthal's experience and expertise and so that is another reason (for me, at least) to lean in favor of counting on GatherUp for the future.

To be fair, I don't know anything at all about how their (1) their features, or (2) their support are since I fired Grade.us and switched to GatherUp in May 2018.

What I can say is that at that time, a year ago, support at Grade.us was bad (as mentioned above) and the features were, well, not very easy to use, for the most part. Composing the review request emails was very difficult, with a quirky UI that often lost all the work I had done and also arbitrarily removed things that I wanted left in, but I cannot remember now what those were. One thing that I DID like about Grade.us, that GatherUp does not yet have, is automatic sharing of favorable google reviews out to Facebook, but in the overall big picture that's a relatively minor thing.

I also really respect Mike Blumenthal's experience and expertise and so that is another reason (for me, at least) to lean in favor of counting on GatherUp for the future.

Understood. I haven't had those same issues for the most part. But I don't blame you for moving on at all. If I was facing those issues I probably would have as well.

The frustrating thing about both companies, I will say, is that the review sharing on your website is not elegant at all. I've brought this up to Grade.Us but I'm not sure it went anywhere. If GatherUp made the reviews look like these guys do with all the sorting features etc. then I would use GatherUp Business Reviews Bundle plugin for WordPress. If Grade.Us did this then it would cement me with them. But until then, I'll keep using this plugin to display the reviews.

If GatherUp made the reviews look like these guys do with all the sorting features etc. then I would use GatherUp Business Reviews Bundle plugin for WordPress. If Grade.Us did this then it would cement me with them. But until then, I'll keep using this plugin to display the reviews.

Member

I wanted to chime in and address some of what @Tim Colling said. He is absolutely correct. At the time of Tim's need, we had a retreat and completely dropped the ball when it came to a proper response in a timely manner. I actually gave Tim a call and spoke with him personally after the fact. I think it was a major wake up call to how we could do better.

In the year since, we've worked incredibly hard to improve our support and our communications. We now send out monthly newsletters with better updates on our features. We hired 3 new support reps. Kevin, Wes, and Tory, they are all great! We also recently hired a director of customer success Kelly, who has been trying to improve our team and protocols across the board. I'm really excited about the direction of our team. It was unfortunately to lose Tim, but he's in great hands with Aaron, Mike and the Gatherup team. I've always heard great things about their support as well!

Thanks for being such a loyal customer for so long Tim, and I am sorry that your experience with Grade.us left such a bad taste in your mouth.

p.s. Thanks @JoshuaMackens for mentioning us! I'm glad to hear that your experience has been positive and we definitely appreciate your support! Our conversation has had an impact on our road map, but I hope it's within the time frame of your expectations. I am an advocate for design (in general) as well.